The present invention generally relates to the field of statistical evaluation, especially to the ranking of Service Level Agreement violations.
A Service Level Agreement or SLA is a contractual agreement between two parties on one or more service level objectives. An SLA has business impact for both, the provider of a service and the consumer using the service. A service provider usually has more than one active SLA, either for the same consumer or for a set of consumers.
The acceptance of a violation may not only depend on functional criteria but also on business criteria. It might be better to accept a violation for a less important consumer and shift resources to the more important consumer, than to solve the violation for the less important consumer.
New SLAs violated are reported in real times on most of the monitoring applications. Such real times violations are hard to process as they arrive in any order. The simplest way to rank them is using the arrival order but it does not transcript the real importance of a violations. Users or systems can also decide a rank based on some heuristics but these ranking does not capture fully the information regarding an SLA and its possible impact on the system monitored.
Patent specification U.S. Pat. No. 6,556,659 discloses a process for service level management, including a prioritisation of SLA violations. Prioritisation is based on the number of preceding violations of the respective SLA.
Patent application US 20050256946 discloses a mechanism for minimizing losses due to SLA breaches, including a ranking based on penalty associated with SLA violations. Penalty is a monetary compensation to be paid to the customer for not meeting his SLA requirements.